Revision as of 10:30, 12 January 2009

Contents

Introduction

Most people browse the web in their own language. Think about pupils in elementary schools across the world who aren't studying English - yet. To make it possible for them to discover Stellarium, we'd be very grateful if you could provide a translation of the stellarium.org homepage. It's a small task, but extremely important.

What needs to be translated

Everything on the homepage needs to be translated, except the news section.

(Coordinating a fully translated news section would be very difficult to do. On top of that it is often specific information aimed at lead users, so the benefits to most Stellarium users would be rather low.)

The screenshots page doesn't need translation either, they are evocative enough for most users, and the current page design isn't very graceful anyway.

The homepage works with a few php includes. This means that php generates the page on request, which enables the simple inclusion of one file in all translated pages. The list of languages at the bottom is an example of that. Make sure you add or mention the name of the new language.

When a new version is released, the list in the left column might change to highlight new features. For instance, with version 0.8.1, "telescope control" was added. The feature list should be updated now and then in the different languages, to keep it relevant.

A few tips

Save the page to your computer. You now have the starting document to do the translation, via a text editor or a WYSIWYG program.

If you want to test the page on your own server, you could change the stylesheet to this one with absolute links. A few things probably won't work: all php generated content and all relative links. No need to change this. The layout should be correct however - if not, maybe a markup tag was inadvertently deleted.

If you use base tag in head element and in front of link tags, then you can check easily images and relative links without changing to absolute link. Example:

<base href="http://www.stellarium.org/xx/" />

"xx" is two letter code(Ex. Japanese is "ja").

Finished? Mail the file to jome. If you're good with wiki's, edit the table below, and thanks a million!